Soon after Pauline Black joined the Selecter in 1979 to complete the band’s original lineup the band from Coventry, England, scored a hit with its debut single, “On My Radio,” and found itself part of a brand-new scene called 2 Tone for the racial diversity of similar groups who paired Jamaican ska rhythms and melodies with the passion and politics of punk.

Pauline Black and the Selecter will perform three shows in Southern California this month. (Photo by Dean Chalkley)

Pauline Black and Arthur “Gaps” Hendrickson of the Selecter will perform three shows in Southern California this month. (Photo by Dean Chalkley)

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The 2017 album “Daylight” is the Selecter’s most recent studio album.

Pauline Black and the Selecter will perform three shows in Southern California this month. (Photo by Dean Chalkley)

Pauline Black and Arthur “Gaps” Hendrickson of the Selecter will perform three shows in Southern California this month. (Photo by Dean Chalkley)

“When we started out there was an obvious kind of anarchic passion that everybody in the Selecter had,” Black says by phone from her home, still in Coventry. a few days before the Selecter was set for a fall tour that includes three Southern California dates. “And it wasn’t just us. There were bands like the Specials, the Beat.

“We were working-class blacks and whites in the same groups,” she says. “I’m not going to say it was completely new, but it was different. And we’ve always done that, tried to look across cultures to see what somebody over there was doing. What somebody in Jamaica was doing. What somebody in Nigeria was doing.”

Those early songs talked about love and weightier issues too — racism, sexism, poverty and politics among them — and while the world has changed plenty in the four decades since the Selecter began, Black says there’s no shortage of issues to write and sing about today.

“I think the ideas behind ‘Subculture’ and ‘Daylight’ were very much rooted in the political culture having changed in this country and your country,” she says of the songs on the Selecter’s two most-recent studio albums, released in 2015 and 2017.

In the United Kingdom the issue of Brexit — the vote to separate from the European Union — has been hugely controversial, Black says. And at the same time the United States has experienced the shock of the change from President Barack Obama to President Donald Trump, she notes.

“There was plenty of food for thought,” she says. “Particularly after the Brexit vote because we were very much of the mind that we were better with Europe than without. Many young people have embraced a multicultural world, music, food, travel.

“We felt very much that the way forward was to embrace a multicultural idea, and that seems to be very much against what your President Trump would want to do, and what our country would do as well,” Black says.

Those last two studio albums are filled with strong, catchy songs, part of a late-career rebirth since 2010 for this incarnation of the Selecter, which does not include co-founder and key songwriter Neol Davies but does include its two original vocalists, Black and Arthur “Gaps” Hendrickson.

You can dance to the new tunes as you could to such early hits as “Three Minute Hero” or “Too Much Pressure,” but you can also think about their messages, which Black says have evolved since the end of the ’70s — things have improved, she believes — even as new issues have emerged.

“That period from 2008 and President Obama, it was two steps forward, and these recent times I feel are like one step back,” she says. “People are much more conscious now. Ferguson has happened. Black Lives Matter has happened. The whole #MeToo generation has happened. That genie is out of the bottle. You can’t put that back in and hope people are going to forget.

“But it’s still like how the world, back in 1979, if you wanted change you had to fight for it,” Black says. “Certainly if you’re black or mixed race. Women are only going to get equality when there’s equality of pay, and that’s a huge disparity that’s still going on today, and is not enhanced by having a president who feels that women are his playthings, if you will.”

While 2 Tone bands such as the Selecter, the Specials and Madness might not have found success in the United States as big as they did at home, their influence on the third-wave of ska bands, many of which formed in Southern California in the ’90s, is undisputed. Black, as one of the few women in the scene, was of particular inspiration to No Doubt and Gwen Stefani, who as they broke out as superstars in the late ’90s invited the Selecter to open a series of arena shows for them on the East Coast.

“It was a very happy time and it was very interesting,” Black says. “Though at the time I think that their predominate audience was a lot of teenyboppers and I think what we were about was lost on them somewhat.”

“She told me that when she got into ska music she used to go around Anaheim and I think walked up to one of these talent contests when she was really young and sang ‘On My Radio,’” Black says. “I don’t think she won but she was very proud of this.

“Every now and again I see a little magazine interview that she has done and she will cite us or one of records in her Top 10, which is very nice of her,” she says.

A concert album, “Live At The Roundhouse,” came out this summer, and next year the band plans to tour extensively, hopefully back in the U.S., for its 40th anniversary, Black says.

“We plan to go out and have quite an extravaganza,” she says. “Just kind of take it out there in a celebration that 2 Tone is still around, it still has the same principles, and those principles, anti-racist, anti-sexist, are still important.”

Peter Larsen has been the Pop Culture Reporter for the Orange County Register since 2004, finally achieving the neat trick of getting paid to report and write about the stuff he's obsessed about pretty much all his life. He regularly covers the Oscars and the Emmys, goes to Comic-Con and Coachella, reviews pop music, and conducts interviews with authors and actors, musicians and directors, a little of this and a whole lot of that. He grew up, in order, in California, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oregon. Graduated from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. with degrees in English and Communications. Earned a master's degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Earned his first newspaper paycheck at the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, fled the Midwest for Los Angeles Daily News and finally ended up at the Orange County Register. He's taught one or two classes a semester in the journalism and mass communications department at Cal State Long Beach since 2006. Somehow managed to get a lovely lady to marry him, and with her have two daughters. And a dog named Buddy. Never forget the dog.